firehose

tastefullyoffensive:

Baby bat in a Batman sock, used to protect his injured wing. [x]

emergentfutures:

How Chinese Memes Circumvented Censorship on Tiananmen Square Anniversary

The rubber duck meme was NOT censored this year (only in 2013). Even the most subversive memes, it turns out, have limited shelf life.

Full Story: Kqed

Omar is a great DM. Right to the point.

tastefullyoffensive:

And the winner of Most Unfortunate Name goes to…

I wonder if Dr. Hardick works in the

scoobypup:

every romance ever has starred a girl and are successful in the box office literally what are you talking about im going to pass out

bunfoot:

marssan:

explain

he lives

tastefullyoffensive:

Too many icons on the desktop. [x]

James Turpin's “The Archangel Azrael”

We decided early on that any materials likely to be used only once had to be eliminated from the set or kept to a minimum. One example would be a tutorial that teaches the rules through a scripted adventure. And in deciding that such a tutorial is something we didn’t want, we were able to think about how that kind of resource would be much better suited to other media—such as online video. Because we’re giving players the opportunity to learn the game without investing any money in it (with our move to make Basic D&D a free download), a new player who downloads the rules can then make use of video tutorials that provide a much better experience of how D&D works. This approach would be like packaging a master DM like Chris Perkins in every Starter Set.

Twenty-seven-year-old Sean Moylan of Novato, whose grandfather has been a prominent advocate for a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge, killed himself on Thursday afternoon, leaping to his death from the famed span, a magnet for roughly two dozen suicides a year.

itsraininbritishmen:

i-fuckedsatan:

was that film even real 

yes, and it was the golden masterpiece of my generation.

Markus "Notch" Persson's first commercial release since the mega-super-ultra hit Minecraft is a game about horses on a hillside. That makes sense. Cliffhorse puts players in control of a horse in the grassy, hilly wilderness, and it's available to...

submitted by digitalcakes [link] [4 comments]

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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A supercomputer running a program simulating a 13-year-old boy named Eugene has passed the Turing Test at an event held at London's Royal Society.

The Turing Test is based on 20th century mathematician and code-breaker Turing's 1950 famous question and answer game, 'Can Machines Think?'. The experiment investigates whether people can detect if they are talking to machines or humans. The event is particularly poignant as it took place on the 60th anniversary of Turing's death, nearly six months after he was given a posthumous royal pardon.

If a computer is mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time during a series of five minute keyboard conversations it passes the test. No computer has ever achieved this, until now. Eugene managed to convince 33% of the human judges that it was human.

I'm sure there will be some debate as members of the AI and computing communities weigh in over the next few days, but at first blush, it seems like a significant result. The very first Long Bet concerned the Turing Test, with Mitch Kapor stating:

By 2029 no computer -- or "machine intelligence" -- will have passed the Turing Test.

and Ray Kurzweil opposing. The stakes are $20,000, but the terms are quite detailed, so who knows if Kurzweil has won.

Original Source

ziakid:

[game dev] ah yes withered old antagonist with a grossed collapsed nose

[game dev] still gotta add dem titties tho

Warmer summers aren’t the only thing marching into the Arctic these days—more hot, server-filled data centers are on the way as well. As more companies look to take advantage of colder climates and chilly water to lower the cooling costs of running thousands of servers at full capacity, Scandinavian countries are positioning themselves as data-center locations of choice. However, the geopolitics of surveillance, data privacy and cross-border conflict are melting what were recently relatively calm relations among northern neighbors.

Last week’s announcement by Swedo-Finnish telco TeliaSonera that it’s building a new backbone network in the region’s far north was meant to signal a new phase in shifting global data infrastructure toward higher latitudes. The TeliaSonera deal calls for 40 million euros to be spent on a new highspeed backbone network, Skanova Backbone North, that will run some 1,250 km across northern Sweden to help connect potential data center sites in the region. It is also intended to offer more capacity to the likes of Facebook, which has a major data center in Luleå, Sweden opened in 2011, as well as bitcoin mining outfit KnC Miner, which also located a 10 megawatt-powered center full of its cryptocurrency mining rigs alongside the Lule River for its plentiful and cheap hydroelectricity. Just to the east, Finland hosts Google and a number of other major data centers for exactly the same reasons—cold air, cool water, and available real estate.

However, what were previously open cross-border relations in the region are becoming more tense as more international intelligence activities have come to light through the Edward Snowden revelations. Finland owns 11% of TeliaSonera, formed by a merger of Finnish and Swedish telecom operators in 2002, but reportedly didn’t want to go along with a larger plan to build a network from St. Petersburg through the Baltics into Germany late last year due in part to concerns over Sweden’s cooperation with US surveillance as disclosed by Snowden. The Finnish government granted funding instead to an undersea cable direct from Finland to Germany last month to lessen reliance on current cables, which cross from Denmark to Sweden before reaching Finnish soil.

With data generation, storage, and processing only likely to climb by orders of magnitude in coming years, northern countries hold a lot of important cards. Rising electricity prices mean cooling can often represent a greater cost for managing a data center than the cost of the cutting edge hardware and software inside. Being able to tap plentiful—and low-emission—local sources of electricity is a big deal for the most their most intensive users like Google and Facebook, and can make a major difference in the profit margins of large scale Bitcoin miners like KnC as well who need larger configurations of high-speed processors and cheap electricity to be viable.

Sweden and Iceland in particular have made an effort to flog data center-ready sites to global companies in recent years. Economic development outfit Business Sweden maintains a portfolio of sites to show off to prospective buyers, including former military bases and disused rock shelters. Iceland has been pushing geothermal and hydroelectric assets, as well as its own former NATO base land, to companies that want to position themselves between customers in North America and Europe. However, the two countries have taken very different positions on data privacy, with Iceland standing for more strict privacy protections against outside surveillance, while Sweden has taken a more US-friendly stance.

Adding complications to the data privacy issue is how much Arctic fiber may run through Russia en route to northern Scandinavia and ultimately Central Europe and the Baltics. Plans laid in the past few years to run new high-speed fiber along the northern edge of Russia signed onto by countries such as Finland are looking a bit different to telcos and investors in light of recent geopolitical upheavals stemming from Russia’s involvement in the Ukraine. Though Russia is seen as an important market for data services, it is also seen as a major actor in cyberconflict, making neighbors even more wary of shared data connections.

Finland’s direct undersea cable, like Brazil and the EU’s plan to run a direct cable avoiding the US announced earlier, may mean the days of laying grand transnational communication links are waning. Like oil and gas flows, data flows are becoming increasingly subject to political conflicts. Even in a region that is known for internal cooperation such as the Nordic countries, the politics of surveillance is driving a potential wedge into plans to become an environmental haven for data.

Follow Scott on Twitter @changeist. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

The Taj Mahal is a tourists’ treasure, a so-called wonder of the world, but Indians are apparently less awestruck by it than foreigners.

Of all the domestic visitors to cultural sites—”Centrally protected ticketed monuments” as they’re known officially—12.2% made it to the Taj Mahal. Meanwhile, foreign visitors were twice as likely to visit the white marble complex, accounting for 24.3% of admission to sites across the country, according to India’s Ministry of Tourism.

The disparity between domestic and foreign popularity is also seen at the next three most popular monuments—Agra Fort, Humayun’s Tomb, and Fatehpur Sikri. Each is multiple times more popular among foreign tourists than domestic ones.

The relative popularity of locations and sites reveal distinct differences between the way Indians travel their homeland and the way foreigners visit it. Both sets of travelers are set to increase into the future, and their habits and preferences guide investments in India’s travel and hospitality industries.

Visits by domestic tourists are significantly more numerous than foreign ones everywhere the ministry tracks. In 2012, the Indian government logged 1 billion domestic tourist visits and 20.7 million visits by foreigners. Domestic tourism is typically more popular than foreign tourism around the world.

Eight of the 10 most popular sites among domestic tourists claim greater portions of the Indian tourist cohort than foreign tourist one. That is to say that the sites that are popular to Indians are not the sites that are popular to foreigners, and, to a large extent, vice versa. Most cultural sites have a two-tiered system for tickets, with foreigners paying much more. The Taj Mahal charges foreigners 750 rupees (about $13) and locals 20 rupees (about 34 cents).

Domestic tourism to cultural sites in India is spread much more broadly than foreign tourism; where most foreign visits to sites in India occur at just four locations, it takes 10 locations to account for 50% of domestic visitors.

The most popular sites for locals are grouped around Delhi in the north of the country. The most popular sites for foreigners are in the south. The north-south trend is largely reflected also reflected in visits to various Indian states.

Indeed, the India that Indians travel is truly different than the one that foreigners visit.

This article is a part of Quartz India. For more, follow this link.

This might be the worst Facebook experience ever.

And yet U2opia mobile, a Singapore-based company founded by Indian entrepreneurs, has catapulted to 17 million users in 36 countries as a result. To understand why, you have to unlearn Facebook—its blue background, viral videos, photo uploads—as you know it. And put yourself in the position of someone who has never been on the internet before.

U2opia takes dumb phones and uses the so-called Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) protocol to allow such phones to connect to specific internet services such as Twitter and Facebook tailored for the small screen and text-only functionality. This is done through the company’s proprietary platform Fonetwish, which has signed agreements with Facebook and Twitter. An estimated 62% of the phones used in the world are dumb phones, officially called “feature phones” by manufacturers and networks. Their market share is much higher in emerging markers.

Since its launch in 2011, the platform has steadily acquired users on 53 operator networks in 36 countries. They’re in places as far apart as Senegal, Somalia, South Sudan, Chad, Niger, Haiti, Honduras, Columbia, El Salvador, Cambodia, Palestine, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India and Mauritania, among others. To get online, they dial a short three-digit code and then they use the alphanumeric keypad.

Operators in several markets, such as Dialog Axiata in Sri Lanka, run promotions allowing Facebook on USSD access for free for a limited period. In India, the platform was used before elections by the think tank Association of Democratic Reforms to make candidate info such as declared assets, education, and criminal records available to rural voters.

The service is available currently in seven languages—English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Malay, Swahili and Albanian. Vietnamese is on its way. Now, 1.5 million users are signing up each month to use Facebook and Twitter in this manner.

U2opia’s real achievement is not in making Facebook available on feature phones. It is that it used the global lure of Facebook and Twitter to build an emerging markets user base that is of interest and value to all manner of clients. A European football club wants to develop an interactive application for their fans in Africa. A large UK media company wants to reach a far-flung audience. An American health care nonprofit wants to reach parts of the emerging world. A US seed company wants to do a field trial with farmers in Andhra Pradesh. All are in talks with U2opia to build those services on top of U2opia’s technical platform.

Market research firms are in talks to use Fonetwish to reach a demographic that is typically tough and expensive to survey.

“The service works as sort of a springboard to data usage. People who use our service, move to data faster,” says Sumesh Menon, CEO of U2opia. He named the company after his favourite rock band, U2.

USSD is a protocol that is as old as SMS and similarly built into the architecture of mobile phones. This means there is no need to customize the service to suit a handset maker or model. Smartphone users no longer need USSD, but most mobile phone users have used it at some point. It is the same protocol that allows you to dial a code—something like *123#, for instance—to check the credit in your mobile phone.

“So user friction is very little. Most of our customers are familiar with how USSD works,” Menon says.

The experience might be barebones, but the functionality is surprisingly full-fledged. A user can access her newsfeed, update status, post on a friend’s wall, review friend requests, read and send messages, and see notifications. When a user dials the code, a session is created and the user can browse using codes for back and forward, and other functions. Most mobile operators offer bite-sized subscription packages. In India, I tried the service using Airtel and was charged Rs10 (17 cents) for a week.

Menon says that 60% of users who sample the service return to use it. And demographics are favourable for long-term growth—some 90% of users are below the age of 24. Interestingly, 5% of Fonetwish users access the service from smartphones. Many users in emerging markets don’t subscribe to data despite owning smartphones, which they use to watch and record videos.

U2opia now has 180 employees and offices in New Delhi, Singapore, and Dubai. Menon started the company in 2011 with co-founder Ankit Nautiyal. They used to be colleagues at the Singapore startup Bubble Motion. The company raised a round of funding from Matrix Partners India in 2011. Menon declined to discuss numbers, but said revenues were growing 20% quarter-on-quarter. The company makes money through telecom companies sharing revenue from the Fonetwish platform.

The company has been profitable since 2013 and is not looking to raise money immediately. U2opia has its immediate task cut out for it—to capture more of the mass market it is targeting. Through the 50 operators worldwide it works with, its services can be accessed by one billion users in emerging markets. In India alone, out of the 900 million-plus mobile subscribers, 550 million can access Fonetwish services, thanks to a slew of deals with several major telcos, including the state-run BSNL.

In fact its reach has become the main competitive advantage of U2opia. There are others that provide similar services—the French-Swiss company Myriad, for instance. But U2opia’s deals with operators mean it practically has the emerging world covered. It is currently working on launches in Vietnam, the Philippines, Zimbabwe, and Morocco.

While operators typically negotiate hard with companies offering value-added services on their network, they like to work with U2opia because people who use Facebook on USSD tend to soon subscribe to mobile data, a business that typically offers higher margins than voice.

The company is now opening its app-development platform so clients can build and test their applications and select the networks around the world they want to deploy. Because U2opia has bought a USSD code (say *315#)with all these operators, it can easily implement a client’s solution on a sub-code (*315*55#).

India’s banking regulator has also recommended USSD and SMS Toolkit (a secure form of SMS) as the preferred protocols for the development of mobile banking in India.

But while the near term appears attractive for U2opia, there is no wishing away the long-term trend—smartphones and data plans will continue to become cheaper, and users will upgrade to better ways of accessing Facebook. For the first time, smartphones outsold feature phones worldwide in the last quarter of 2013, accounting for 57.6% of total sales.

But U2opia has time on its hands. And Menon says the company is developing some other products, too—this time, for smartphones.

This article is a part of Quartz India. For more, follow this link.

I just watched the introduction and advanced sessions on CloudKit. I’ve recently written my own backend syncing system using Azure Mobile Services, and that’s the perspective I’ll bring to these notes.

(Disclaimer: Mobile Services is sponsoring this site this week. That’s not why I’m writing this, but I should say that up front.)

First off — holy shit.

It’s closer to the metal than, for instance, iCloud Core Data syncing. The backend is not tied to the local database layer. It handles blobs and structured data.

It differentiates between public and private data.

The APIs are a transport mechanism. It uses change tokens for delta updates (what I called sync tokens). There’s no magic, and error handling is necessary.

Authentication and identity is handled by the system, and privacy is emphasized.

In other words: it’s wonderful.

Limits

Could we have used it for Vesper, had it been available a year ago?

Almost. There are three things that would have prevented it, and the first two are huge.

It’s only iOS and OS X. I understand that that’s the point, and I don’t say that Apple’s wrong for doing it this way. I get it. But using CloudKit means not being able to do a Vesper web app, and we’re keeping that option open.

The second thing is that there’s no facility for building services on top of these services — there’s no way to run my own code in the cloud. I require that, because there are services I’d like to build. (How cool if it allowed us to run our own Swift code on the server.)

The third thing that would concern me about using it with Vesper is the limits. It’s possible those will change, and it’s possible that more clarification would take away those concerns.

Here are those limits. Some of them looks insanely generous — 1PB for assets storage!

But also notice that the data transfer grows just 0.5MB/user for assets, and 5KB/user for database. That’s not actually that much, and I could see going over those limits. And I know from experience that it’s difficult to estimate in advance what the average user’s needs would be.

What happens if we hit those limits? I don’t know. More information would be good. Actual experience by a number of developers who can share their stories and numbers will also be helpful.

I’ll put it this way: even if we could use CloudKit for web apps, and even if we could add our own code, I’d be concerned enough about the limits to want to talk to folks at Apple to get more information. My suspicion is that Vesper would have been fine, but I wouldn’t have allowed optimism, however reasonable, to prevent me from due diligence.

Resemblance to Mobile Services

I mentioned that we use Azure Mobile Services in Vesper. This system is similar in a few ways: there’s a framework that lets you upload and fetch and run NSPredicate-based queries; there’s a portal where you can configure a bunch of stuff; and it uses a just-in-time schema for the database.

At first I thought that structured data was stored in a NoSQL database, but instead it appears that it does what Mobile Services does. When the endpoint gets an object with properties, it dynamically updates the SQL database schema to include any previously-unseen properties.

Then, before you deploy, you freeze your schema.

I don’t think that CloudKit is built on Mobile Services, but it’s possible that it’s built on some of the same tech. That just-in-time schema seemed very Azure-like to me. (I know people. Everyone says they can’t confirm or deny, which is not a surprise, but we do believe that Apple has used Azure for other iCloud services.)

Resemblance to Azure Table Storage

At first I thought that structured data was stored in Azure Table (NoSQL) storage because of the references to zones. A zone in CloudKit could correspond to a table in Azure table storage or a container in Azure blob storage.

And it’s totally possible that structured data actually is stored in NoSQL table storage, and it just looks sort of like SQL because it enforces a schema eventually, but I doubt it.

Unstructured data, however, would have to be stored in Azure blob storage or something like Amazon S3. (It’s entirely possible that Apple uses multiple providers, of course.)

Summary

One of the slides said that syncing is hard. While this makes it much easier, it doesn’t do everything. You still have to handle errors and conflicts. It takes design and work.

But that’s to be expected.

And it’s nice. Real nice.

Could you write a traditional RSS reader with a content service with it? If you could figure out how to get your feed crawler to get content into the public database. If you can figure out an efficient way to store read/unread states of many thousands of items per user. So: maybe.

How about Glassboard? CloudKit has public and private data, but no groups, so this would take some trickery. If you could do it, it would be at the expense of bending some things, and it might not be secure. And then you’d have to kill the web and Android clients. So: no.

But I still bet that lots of apps will benefit from this. Somewhere people are thinking about their existing apps and how they’d benefit — and people are planning new apps that they wouldn’t have otherwise been willing to try.

I think this is going to be a huge deal. I think it’s the first time Apple has really nailed a web service for developers. And I tip my hat to the team (or teams) behind all this. Good job, folks.

Manu Ginobili has done his fair share of flopping throughout his terrific basketball career. In the second quarter of Game 2 of the NBA Finals, Dwyane Wade gave him a taste of his own medicine with this shameless flop.

Manu got called for a foul as Wade pretended to be shot in the eye with a laser cannon and had to sit down with his third foul of the game.

Five people are reported dead following a shooting near a Las Vegas Walmart. There were two attackers — one male and one female — and both reportedly killed themselves after the assault. It’s unclear how many in total are dead, but local reports indicate that the death toll is at least five, including the shooters. According to 8NewsNow, the shooting commenced when two suspects stormed a nearby pizzeria at around 11:30 and shot and killed two police officers inside. Witnesses say that the suspects then took the officers’ weapons and ammunition, proclaiming that “the revolution has begun” and heading into the Walmart across the street. 

true-funny:

I hate it when I forget to upgrade one type of unit

superopinionated:

chickwithmonkey:

I’ve literally had nothing else to think about for the last 30 hours but that. [x]

i am 10000% down with crystal reed as kate bishop. whoever thought of this is a genius.

I AM NOW IN LINE FOR THIS MOVIE AS WELL.

kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate kate kate kate kate kate kate

tobyjones:

Comics

All images are copyright © Sara Angelucci


All images are copyright © Sara Angelucci


All images are copyright © Sara Angelucci


All images are copyright © Sara Angelucci


All images are copyright © Sara Angelucci

The Aviary, Sara Angelucci